What is good service design? What are examples of things gone wrong and why? I am collecting thoughts and experiences here about services in general and health services in particular and am looking forward to your comments.

Thursday, 25 February 2016

In October I wrote a piece for the World Economic Forum blog on health data and questions around who (should) own it.

Who should own our health data?

The amount of available health-related data is exploding. The increase is driven by both healthcare data, such as electronic medical records, but also user-generated data, such as activity and sleep profiles collected by wearables. The available data is set to more than double every two years until 2020, according toa study by EMC and the research firm IDC. This translates into a 15-fold increase between 2013 and 2020. If one imagines this amount of data stored on tablet computers, the resulting stack, which in 2013 is around 8,800 km high, would be more than one third of the way to the moon by 2020.

"Non-communicable diseases such as cancer are more than a personal tragedy – they're a threat to global prosperity. Their cumulative direct and indirect cost over the next 15 years will be around five times the cost triggered by the financial crisis in the 15 years following 2008"

Monday, 22 February 2016

The next blog post in the series by the World Economic Forum where constituents of the Forum engage with the ideas of my report "How to Realize Returns on Health" is by Sania Nishtar of Heartfile.

Can the private sector help achieve universal health coverage?

Image: Reuters/ Jorge Lopez

When the world committed to ending poverty, protecting the planet and ensuring prosperity for all with the17 Sustainable Development goals, we knew no single entity would be able to achieve such lofty goals – it would take collaboration. “A successful sustainable development agenda requires partnerships between governments, the private sector and civil society,” Goal 17 stated.

Friday, 19 February 2016

The World Economic Forum is currently publishing a series of posts engaging with the ideas of my World Economic Forum Report "How to Realize Returns on Health". The first post is by Jonathan Jackson of Dimagi.

What can technology do for global health?

Image: Reuters/ Stringer

This year, the focus of the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos was on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and how the technology revolution is changing all aspects of our world. The effects are particularly profound in the healthcare field.

Thursday, 18 February 2016

On Monday, the second blog by me and the partner I worked for in the last 10 months went live on the World Economic Forum blog.

The silent pandemic that threatens the global economy

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cancer and diabetes are a silent pandemic of our own making and a real threat not only to human health but to global prosperity. To put this threat into perspective: the cumulative direct and indirect costs of NCDs over the next 15 years will be about five times the costs triggered by the global financial crisis in the 15 years following 2008, according to Bain analysis based on data from the World Economic Forum and Harvard University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Tuesday, 2 February 2016

After demonstrating in Maximizing Healthy Life Years that health can have a positive return on investment, the 2016 report How to Realize Returns on Health shows how to tackle the silent NCD pandemic: why we should focus on Maximizing Healthy Life Years (MHLY) instead of just treating disease, why we need to act boldly now and how investments into health can have healthy returns in a multi-stakeholder environment by creating Ecosystems of Health.

Developed by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with Bain & Company, this report covers

How investments into health can have healthy returns

How Ecosystems of Health align private and public stakeholders across sectors and industries

How the individual must be put at the center to make these ecosystems happen

How Ecosystems of Health create the foundation for market-driven solutions to tackle NCDs and to Maximize Healthy Life Years

About Me

Despite being a physicist and engineer by background, I have been working on healthcare since 2008. For the first 4 years as a researcher studying the cross roads between engineering design, design thinking, service science and healthcare management. Later, I moved into consulting, where I am working with pharma, medtech and medical services. 2015/2016 I was selected as a secondee to the World Economic Forum, where I spent 11 months trying to figure out how to prevent non-communicable diseases and drive change that allows people to maximize their Healthy Life Years.